My First Birth Story

Well hey there, friends, welcome to my blog!

I will be using this space to offer insight into all kinds of pregnancy, birth, and baby-related topics, but what better way for you all to get to know me to begin with than by sharing my own birth stories?

(Apologies in advance if birth stories aren’t your thing, but I know I personally couldn’t get enough of them during either of my pregnancies and I still read at least a couple every day in Home Birth Support Group UK.)

As you may already know from reading my “About Me” page, I have been blessed with two beautiful babies. At the time of writing this (January 2023), my eldest, Lucy, is about to turn four years old and my youngest, Bertie, has just turned two. Although Lucy and Bertie were both born at home, their births - much like they, themselves - varied hugely in many aspects and were both monumental learning experiences for me in the twists and turns each and every birth is capable of making, regardless of the presence of any consistent factors.

Though I was not yet a doula when Lucy entered the world on 17 December, 2019, I was already well on my way to becoming one. Without really intending to, I had inadvertently gone ahead and read a PhD-level amount of books, journal articles, blog posts, and research papers on pregnancy and childbirth ahead of going into labour. I knew, going into pregnancy, that I would take birth preparation seriously as calling my own shots in my medical care has always been something I consider extremely important, but I didn’t realise how fascinated I’d end up becoming by all of it.

Even with all of that preparation under my belt, though, there was still so much that surprised me and so much that I wasn’t really prepared for until I was thrown in at the deep end.

That’s the thing about labour and birth; you can read all the birth stories and listen to all the podcasts in the world, but you really won’t know until you know.

So, with that said, let’s dive right in, shall we?

The days before…

Lucy was, by my own calculation (and that of the first three scans I had in the very very early days of pregnancy due to bleeding) due on December 16. However, the official NHS 12 week dating scan put me at December 11.

“Great!” I thought. “Baby will be here even earlier and we’ll have more time to get used to newborn life before Christmas!”

Ah, reader, how naïve I was.

You see, being given an earlier estimated due date (EDD) than you were originally expecting does NOT mean your baby is actually going to arrive earlier. In fact, only 4% of babies arrive on their EDD. All it usually means, in practice, is more due date anxiety for you and more pressure from your midwife to book in an induction if you go “over”.

So, to no one’s surprise, December 11 came and went with little incident. The midwife offered me a stretch and sweep at my 40 week appointment that day, which I declined due to evidence that would suggest sweeps are ineffectual at the best of times and do absolutely sod all if you’re not yet anywhere near labour. Having had not so much as a wee twinge that day, then, I went on my merry way and did some shopping at the Bath Christmas market.

The following night, though, things started getting a tiny bit interesting.

Really not all that interesting, but basically I started feeling some contractions. They were extremely mild, irregular, and only just slightly more uncomfortable than the Braxton Hicks I’d been having for weeks, but they were definitely there.

Except, as soon as I got up to go to bed, they went away again.

The same pattern followed for the next two nights: The sun would go down, I’d get myself comfortable on my birthing ball in front of the TV, and the mild and irregular contractions would come and go until I got up to go to bed, at which point they’d bugger off. Then, on the night of the 15th, as my husband and I were at the cinema watching “Knives Out”, they started to feel a little more serious, and get a little more reliably timeable.

“OK,” I thought to myself. “Here we go.”

I whispered to James that I thought we should probably put the birth pool up when we got home and I spent the rest of the film making him dig his fist into my lower back to try to offset the discomfort. And then we got up to leave the cinema and…

The contractions stopped again.

So, by the morning of the 16th, I was fed up. I’d had enough of the anticipation and nervous excitement. I was exhausted, I was in constant discomfort due to SPD, and I was roughly the size and shape of Shamu.

I was really ready to not be pregnant anymore.

I called the local Maternity Day Assessment Unit (DAU) to book myself in for a sweep that morning. Considering the reading I’d done on it, I felt weirdly like I was doing something a bit naughty, but I also knew that I was going into it fully informed and pretty certain I was on the precipice of true labour, so what did I have to lose? (A lot, as it turns out, but I’ll write a whole post on sweeps another time.)

I was lucky. The sweep revealed good news: I was already two centimetres dilated.

Now, it’s important to remember that this didn’t necessarily mean much. Many pregnant women can spend much of their final weeks of pregnancy at one, two, or even three centimetres dilated. But I didn’t care. All I really heard the midwife saying was that something was happening. I wasn’t being delusional. We were almost there!

“Keep going as you are,” the midwife assured us. “Do some nice things today and get the oxytocin going. Baby will be here in no time.”

And so that’s what we did. We went for a waddle around town, I had my favourite breakfast at my favourite cafe, went book shopping and bought a book that I still to this day have not got around to reading, and watched a bunch of silly films and TV.

And then the sun went down, and it all started again. Only this time, it was different. This time, it was dead on every 10 minutes. This time, I had to discreetly breathe through the waves so as not to alert any of the family members who had gathered round us that night of what may or may not have been happening.

By 11 PM, things were still going, so I rang our doula, Amber, who said things sounded "promising”, but advised that I stay as relaxed as possible and to try to get some rest while I still could. So off to bed I went.

But not for long.

The day of…

I woke up at exactly 2 AM with one hell of a stomach pain. The kind you usually get along with some pretty nasty food poisoning, only it was coming in waves. It took my half-asleep brain a few minutes to register what it probably was, but once I’d figured it out, I got up my contraction timer app and went off to have a bath…

…and lost my mucus plug on the way to the bathroom.

The bath idea wasn’t to relax me. It was a litmus test Amber had mentioned to me: early labour often slows down in response to a bath, whereas true labour tends to speed up. Within a few minutes of getting in the bath, my contractions became intense enough that I had to audibly breathe through them with my eyes closed.

OK. Finally. Showtime.

I woke up my husband and my cousin, who had flown in from our hometown of NYC to be one of my birth partners, and they sprung into action setting up the birth space as I tried to focus on the contractions and keeping track of them using the app. By 3 AM, I’d called Amber. She was with us by 4, and by the time dawn broke, she had me crab-walking up and down the stairs as my contractions gradually increased in frequency and intensity. We called the midwives at 8 AM and they were there at 9. It was all really happening.

Or… was it?

The thing about inviting midwives into your birth space is that, as lovely as they might be, they’re still (unless you’re incredibly fortunate to have ones you’ve met before) unknown entities to you. And the oxytocin flow that drives natural labour can be a shy little thing who runs and hides in the bushes at the slightest disruption. So having Jackie and Emily, as wonderful as they are, barging into my house just as the sun was truly coming up and the whole vibe of the space was changing anyway, was probably not the greatest timing. With hindsight, we probably should have waited a few more hours before asking them to come round. But, as it was, they were there at 9 AM, timing my contractions, taking my temperature and listening to Lucy’s heartbeat every 15 minutes and things, unsurprisingly, ground to a halt.

On top of all the action and change going on around me, I was exhausted. I had shot up out of bed a good few hours earlier than I probably really needed to, and had been labouring consistently by that point for seven hours. I needed to sleep, and so began dozing off in between contractions and, probably, encouraging them to drop off quite considerably so that my body could garner the energy it needed to get through the rest of labour.

It’s easy to say now, but I should have taken this as a sign to get back in bed for a bit. Had I known then what I know now through my experiences as a doula, I’d have sent the midwives packing and I’d have tried to get some shut-eye while I still could. Jackie and Emily themselves even suggested they might go for a bit.

But, in the moment, I couldn’t bear the idea of the midwives leaving. I thought them doing so would somehow mean I’d failed. I thought they’d go off to another birth and not be able to come back when I needed them, thereby forcing me to transfer to hospital. I thought a lot of things, and most of them were really not very helpful.

Thankfully, due to our copious chats in the antenatal period in which Amber got the gist of what an anxious, perfectionist mess I can sometimes be (THIS is why we doulas like to make sure we get to know you as well as we can before we attend your birth!!!), Amber was able to convince the midwives to stay, but struck a bargain with me at the same time: I had to get up and go for a walk.

I won’t sugarcoat it. I hated every step of that walk. I was so tired and in so much pain. The midwives had suggested before I started pacing the hallway that allowing them to artificially break my waters might help to hurry things along and I said I’d have a think about it. I used my walk - in between increasingly intense contractions - to chat to my Amber about this proposal and ultimately decided against it. I was OK. My baby was OK. No one was in any danger. There was no rush. She’d figure it out and come out when she was ready. I just had to hang in there.

But that was much easier said than done.

I went to the toilet when we got back into our flat and immediately had a contraction so strong I thought for sure I was going to die. I broke. James came in and I sobbed on his shoulder. I didn’t know what to do and he didn’t know what to do for me. The only thing I could do was ride it out and get back in the pool. Try to chill out a bit. But, on getting back in the pool, I immediately started trembling uncontrollably.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked Amber through so much sobbing honestly I’m surprised she understood me.

“I can’t make promises,” she said, “but it looks like transition.”

Thank god for that.

The ensuing minutes… or maybe it was hours… are a blur. Things ramped up further. I continued trying to focus on my breathing. The midwives finally started acting like things were actually progressing, which helped encourage me along. And then I noticed my contractions change. As described in the hypnobirthing course I’d done and in everything I’d read on the subject, I started feeling the need to bear down with my contractions. It was at this stage that I finally accepted the kind offer of gas and air from the midwives (I hadn’t wanted to try it as I don’t like the feeling of being drunk), but at this point it didn’t touch the sides, it just gave me something to bite down on.

And then I felt something else I had read about: the ring of fire. And my first thought was, “NOPE.” Seriously. I tried to hold her in. I was thinking, “No way am I doing this. Everybody go home. There will be no baby today.” And then my rational brain took over. “The only way out is through,” she told me. And, even though I badly wanted to tell her to shut up, I knew she was right. I rode out the next contraction and pushed when I felt the urge.

Then, all at once, I felt the almighty pop of my waters breaking and the instant intense pain and immediate relief of my baby being born. My waters had broken as she was crowning and had shot her out on a wave of amniotic fluid.

My baby girl was earthside.